My head was buzzing with ideas for a department project when the first full semester of my sabbatical ended in December 2006.

Additionally, I was yearning to be learning some programming after listening in on many of my peers' discussions during John's Introduction to Digital Media class.    Everyone was chatting about Action Scripting and PHP, and although I hadn't a clue what those things actually are, I was set on finding out how to put those topics into my spring study.

That's where Ryan comes into the picture, thanks to the pragmatic leadership of Dr. Dell.   As Ryan and I began to work through the lessons of programming in PERL, while I was trying to understand the whole programming language concept, we discussed my many ideas for practical classroom tools, but quickly focused on, what I prefer to call,

The Valentine Project.

Working as a fifth grade teacher in the Haddonfield School district for the last nine years, my teaching partner and I developed a Valentine's Day activity that is absolutely wonderful.   Over the years, we have worked to incorporated writing lessons into the endeavor, and hassled over ways to make the project more efficient, so that the teacher hours involved in producing the final product were less staggering in number.

The project was initially inspired by a Chicken Soup story  All the Good Things, by Helen P. Mrosla.   In a nutshell, this story is about a teacher struggling with misbehaving students who are unkind to one another.   Desperate for a moment of peace, Sister Helen, the classroom teacher, instructs the students to sit down, take out a piece of paper, and write something nice about each of his/her classmates.   Sister Helen is so impressed with what she reads that weekend, that she painstakingly organizes and transcribes the works onto a list for each child.   The list contains what each classmate had written about him/her.   The teacher's re-telling describes the moment she distributes the comments the following Monday morning.   The story ends many years later when, at the funeral for her most beloved student, Sister Helen comes to find that her students held on to those precious pieces of paper, carrying them on their persons over the years.

So sometime each January, when our classes get a little rowdy, and the students aren't being particularly kind to one another, my colleague Laurie and I have them do just as Sister Helen did, and write something nice about each and every student in the class.   We have tried to organize this activity many different ways.   We have had them write on loose leaf about every student, on loose leaf about some students, on the computer, on index cards.   Regardless of the methods we have tried, just before every Valentine's Day we scramble to organize the information into a Valentine's Day card.  Click to see a sample valentine

Exhausted and sleep deprived, we hand deliver the cards every year on Valentine's Day.   I hand out the cards asking the students to leave them unopened while I read Sister Helen's story.  After I finish, I ask the students to open their cards and quietly read them.   I have yet to find words to describe the power of that moment in the classroom each February 14th.

This activity, which appears as 'Write Nice' in my department project, is very near and dear to my heart and has been a labor of love. The project is written in PERL, Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, which is an open source server side programming language.  Perl scripts are not embedded within HTML (web) pages and do not download to the web browser but reside on the server.   This meant, I needed a server.   My server space has been purchased through Media Temple, which also hosts my database.  The database is managed by MySQL (pronounced "my ess cue el"), an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database.  (definitions from: www.shop-script.com/glossary.html#c)  In order to develop web pages that are both attractive and functional, I had to refresh and update my existing knowledge of HTML, and learn CSS, Cascading Style Sheets.

To date, the project includes:

Registration sites for both student and teacher users

Password protected logins

Customized word-processing

Data saved, sorted and organized through my database

A little PERL program that counts specific words in a student's writing.

Our project includes accompanying lessons on the overuse of pronouns, and on using interesting adjectives, so the students are reminded of these critical skills when the words are counted for them. Typically students begin every sentence with he or she and use smart, nice, and fun when describing every student! (Craig helped me code this idea before he became my official mentor!)

I have already begun to extend the functions my program offers to students and teacher, but my most pressing future goal is to use this with real students and a teacher or two this upcoming fall. I am also excited to begin programming the following additions into the existing script:

A printable page for teachers so that the final valentine can be a one click printing operation

A customized list, resembling a thesaurus, that will support students in choosing interesting adjectives

Display choices to accommodate user needs and preferences

Poetry, Social Studies and Journal writing options